When last we met I was banging on about stag nights and homophobic banter, the two intertwined more closely than David Cameron’s tongue and the devil’s dirty bumhole. There was a lot of it kicking about and much of it incredibly immature. I never would have believed the word ‘gaylord’ was still in use, or that if it was it would be used so often, or that if it was and was being used often it would be by full-grown adults, or that if it was and they were they’d be using it on a non-ironic basis. But that’s the thing with homophobia: It’s basically everywhere.

At the stag it was on the level of supposedly non-homophobic name calling, where people make out it’s not homophobia at all, where objects or concepts are gay if you don’t like them, where people are fags if you think they’re stupid, where homosexuality is a byword for badness. Morons like this. Chris Moyles liked this, spreading his family-friendly homophobia to millions of listeners because he’s a cock. That earned him Stonewall’s Bully of the Year award. Like they said, ‘Chris Moyles is not helping young LGBT people struggling to come out through his comments’. But it’s not just charmless ex-DJs who indulge in this shit. A teacher in Mrs Zero’s old school used to call stuff gay to sound down with the kids. The straight kids. Presumably the gay kids and the bisexual kids and the kids who hadn’t quite figured themselves out were less keen to get down with him on account of him being an arsehole.

If you know anything about wedges you’ll recognise that as the thin end of one, the other end being homophobic threats, homophobic violence and vandalism, homophobic murder, homophobic politics, religions and laws backed up by a homophobic media. Back in 2008, Stonewall, the campaigning charity that looks to even things up a bit, ran a survey of homophobic crimes in the UK. It reckoned one in five lesbians and gay men had been on the receiving end of a homophobic incident or hate crime in the preceding three years, that one in six of these incidents involved physical assault, that one in eight involved unwanted sexual contact. Occasionally these things make the headlines. There was the guy in Edinburgh beaten by four men and a woman. There were the two men in Coventry punched in the face and kicked in the chest because one of them looked wrong to their attacker. There was Stuart Walker, murdered. And although the world seems to be getting its shit together and it seems like every generation looks back at the last thinking it was in the stone age, the Stonewall survey found people aged 18-24 were far more likely to be abused and harassed than were old people, and that young men seemed to be the most common perpetrators. As level as society’s getting – which isn’t very – it’s headed wrong here.

A look around the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill tells you how the world’s working, people talking about ‘gay marriage’ as opposed to ‘marriage equality’ like people are asking for something special as opposed to what the straight part of the world’s always had. Without the bill, straight people getting married is like people playing golf in a country club that doesn’t allow Jews. A look at the bill’s debate tells you everything you need to know about the people working to keep it that way. People like David Burrowes who reckons “the state is trying to divide and rule the meaning of marriage”. People like Ian Paisley who reckons marriage equality is killing heterosexual marriages in Spain and Portugal. People like Tony Baldry, who chipped in some wisdom from Christianity and Islam to say how much the idea sucked. People like Roger Gale, who reckoned the bill was almost Orwellian, that same-sex marriage had the whiff of Alice in Wonderland about it and who made a helpful reference to incest. Twats, all of them. The bill got through, obviously, and progress is on its way. But these poisonous people still think these poisonous things, and millions of poisonous people agree with them.

We need a Chazza of the Month that’s going to fix all this. A charity that campaigns for equality in law, that points to inequalities in politics and the media, a charity that works in schools to help gay and lesbian kids with what they’re going through and shouldn’t be, that tells other kids to not be assholes, that will make stag nights of the future halfway bearable for people who aren’t galactic twats. I’m thinking maybe Stonewall. They take money right here.

It’s tricky, this male feminism lark. It’s hard, looking like the enemy I’m trying to fight. I am, if we’re keeping track of these things, a white, able-bodied, heterosexual man packed full of privilege and power, weighed down by the burdens and baggage of my demographic brethren whose history of racist, disablist, homophobic, sexist behaviour has been ballsing things up since we first crawled out of the soup and said everyone else was shit. In my heart I’m catastrophically disabled, fiercely lesbianic, a kaleidoscope of skin colours rotating in direct opposition to the majority skin colour of the people around me. Sadly it’s for my body, rather than my right-on soul, that I am judged. And even the body’s working alright now, the intersectionality points I had for my wheelchair lost in a haze of half marathons and tip top health. True, disability didn’t counter the tyranny of my genitals or my skin colour but it moved me a little along the continuum, a little away from the Jeremy Clarkson end of things, a little towards a limping Condoleeza Rice. Just to the left of that wee guy from Diff’rent Strokes. Yes yes. As I’ve often said, there’s nothing worse than being a white, able-bodied, heterosexual man. Except for being one or all of the opposites of all of those things.

My latest struggle in this patriarchal madhouse for which I am demographically responsible has been one of the toughest yet: organising a stag do. My oldest and truest friend, my most loyal and loving confidante has, in the absence of a better alternative, asked me to be his best man. What an honour. What a privilege. What a pain in the ass it’s been. Get more than three men in a room together, chances are they’ll revert to blokey stereotype quicker than you can say “Tits and beer”. Chances are half of them won’t have any reverting to do having never strayed from the stereotype to begin with. It’s hard, putting together a feminist stag night when so many of the traditions are sexist bollocks, when so many of the attendees want the traditional sexist bollocks and when there are so many pairs of actual bollocks. An unreconstructed stag night means putting the stag in a dress and heels because resembling a woman is humiliating, trading barbed witticisms about his lack of masculinity and/or his latent homosexuality because both are hilarious, demonstrating the correlation between the relative spiciness of available curries and the size of the eater’s penis because brown people don’t eat like us, and paying a woman or women to remove their clothing and/or perform a sex act because nothing celebrates the beginning of a lifelong union like engaging the services of a sex worker. If you’re not keen on misogyny, homophobia and racist banter these things can grate a little.

Have to say, I object to the cliché almost as much as the misogyny. Hen nights kill me the same way, all spa days and dares, all cocktails and sparklers, all L plates and deely boppers and inflatable cocks. As someone who’s lived 34 consecutive years refusing to utter the phrase “At the end of the day” that shit pains me. But still, the misogyny was the bigger problem. And I was up against it.

I thought maybe we could go abroad, take in the sights. They thought maybe we could go to a strip club, take in the tits. I thought maybe we could do a parachute jump. They thought maybe we could do a strip club. I thought rock climbing. They thought strip club. I thought bowling. They thought strip club. I thought basically anything that wasn’t a strip club. They thought more along the lines of a strip club. There was a very definite consensus in terms of the strip club.

I’ve had this happen before, at another stag I didn’t organise and felt even less able to ram my politics into. There the talk of strip clubs went on a few hours until I said I wasn’t going and found myself on the pavement at one in the morning debating gender politics with horny drunk people. There we reached a lousy compromise where I waited in the foyer while they all paid for tits. The fiver I paid to get in still gets to me. This time the strip club wasn’t happening. It didn’t happen. I failed on all other counts.

We put the stag in a dress. They did the curry/dick thing, cracked wise about women and gay men, covered the essentials of football, beer, tits, birds and birds’ tits. I did a few sarky gags to puncture it all but it was like farting against a hurricane. I let most of it go, because when challenging that stuff means ruining your friend’s stag night you either ruin your friend’s stag night or let most of it go. I mostly sold out, let the world be like it is for a night. I won a tiny battle, lost the war. And after I left I’m pretty sure they all went to a strip club. Still, baby steps and all that.